Early attempts at cataloging information resulted in inventions such as the card catalog, the Dewey Decimal system, and the index. With the advent of electronic storage, advances such as the database and online indexing were invented. A common method for retrieving relevant information is embodied in the form of a World Wide Web hyperlink. Certain websites, in response to submitted search criteria, will retrieve relevant web pages from the Internet and submit hyperlinks leading to those web pages to a user.
However, a user reading a specific document, who wishes to find information related to the contents of the document, must locate a website containing a search engine, formulate a query, submit the query, and wade through irrelevant documents sorted only by keyword in order to find truly useful information. In many cases, properly submitting a search to capture an underlying concept is extremely difficult with a modern Internet search engine. Further, a user may waste a colossal amount of time formulating the search, locating an appropriate search engine, and wading through the plethora of results before desired information is located. Additionally, the search results returned by an Internet search engine may bear little or no relevance to the points raised by the document author, either due to limitations in the engine or difficulty in formulating the search.
In order to provide more direct access to related information, document authors often include in their document a hyperlink to other documents. This methodology also has drawbacks. If the target hyperlink (also known as a “uniform resource locator”, or “URL”) is removed from the web, the link will point to a site that no longer exists. Additionally, links can only reference a single target, often requiring the author to devise a separate web page that is simply a list of hyperlinks to related sites. The final problem with direct links is that sites that are unknown at the time of authoring cannot be referenced. The longer a document remains online, the more likely its hyperlinks will become “stale”—pointing to old or missing sites.
Thus, there is a need in the art for an improved method for quickly retrieving information from the Internet. There is a further need for a search technique which combines the strengths of the authored hyperlink with the search engine. There is a final need for a search engine offering up-to-date hyperlinks containing an author's knowledge of good web resources.